Louisa leaped to the wardrobe and delved behind furs and a forest of skinkling, gauzy gowns that I could not see either of them ever wearing. She came up with the Jerry pilot’s precious wooden box, and she set that on the bed and undid the lid. There was a school jotter laid over the keys. She picked that up and, solemn as a judge, passed it to Jamie.

He stood gawping at the thing in the box. It wasn’t quite a radio and it wasn’t quite a typewriter.

“What is it?” Jamie breathed.

“The cleaning instructions say it’s a cipher machine,” said Louisa. “And—well, I guess it is. You know about the German pilot who landed here, don’t you? He left the machine, and he left lists of settings for it. We worked out the message that you picked up the other night—it’s all in there.” She waved at the jotter. “I did the decoding, and Jane did the translating. So we both know what it says.” She swallowed, with that worried frown puckering her schoolgirl face. “I’m so afraid it will get Mrs. Warner in trouble.”

“Not you?” said Jamie. He stepped closer, hesitated, and then pressed a key. A lamp came on in the top plate of letters.

“Well, me too, I suppose, but Mrs. Warner—” She stole a keek at Jane.

What the old woman confessed then made my mouth drop open.

“I am German,” she explained softly. “A registered alien.”

I’d never thought.

I’d never thought. Here was a body hiding the exact way I hid: behind an accent and a name and face and flesh like anybody’s.

If people knew where she came from, what would they do? Who’d trust her?

But Louisa did trust her.

Mrs. Warner held her head up. “My stage name was Johanna von Arnim. I was arrested”—she sounded a mite proud of that—“last summer. They said I was a category-B detainee. After they arrested me, though, they demoted me to category-C. I was in prison for three weeks and then interred in a camp for another four months.”

So that’s what they did.

Nan must know. Mrs. Warner was her aunt. Crabbit Nancy Campbell was paying a wage to look after an old German woman!

“Did you do anything?” Jamie asked. “To make them arrest you?”

“If you mean did I cause any risk to national security, I should say not,” said Jane. “But I’m telling you so you know.”

He nodded. Then he glanced up at me.

For a moment I imagined it was a challenge, and he wanted me to give my own confession. But my secret didn’t make me a war enemy. With his la-di-da private school and family castle it probably never crossed Jamie’s mind that I was like Jane. He was just asking me if I trusted Mrs. Warner.

I nodded back to him.